Junior Santiago Arroyo Garcia is a new student and foreign exchange student from Spain looking for more than a high school experience.
“The true objective here isn’t really the academics in general because they are on a much lower level than in Spain,” Arroyo Garcia said. “It’s only to improve my English.”
Garcia is from a small town on the outskirts of Madrid. A foreign exchange student last year, who also happened to be his brother’s friend, Maria Sopedra Montilla mentioned the same foreign exchange program she used.
“Thanks to Maria, my family and I were able to contact the company,” Arroyo Garcia said. “The company then did some tests and requested my grades to see if I was eligible to come here.”
His biggest motive for coming to the U.S. is to improve his English because the majority of good paying jobs in Spain require a certain level of English—especially the career he wants to pursue: environmental engineering of renewable energy.
“English is like a universal language,” Arroyo Garcia said. “For right now, English is the most important thing you have to know.”
Garcia’s host parent also happens to be a part of the school’s faculty. Volleyball coach Brenda Ordaz took in Garcia after she found out his original host family moved away from the area at the last minute in early August through a district teacher page.
“It was funny because other coaches were like, ‘You’re gonna be very busy with volleyball,’ and I was like ‘Well, let’s see how it goes’,” Ordaz said. “So then I told them I’d take him and just hoped for the best because I don’t have kids.”
With her best friend being a foreign exchange student and her fiancé’s parents being past host parents, Ordaz always felt she wanted to host a foreign exchange student at some point in her life. Considering her “rich” Mexican culture and her fiancé’s Brazilian culture, there are some “important parts of growing up in American culture” that she feels she missed out on.
“Being a first generation American, there’s a lot of things I’m experiencing myself that I would say I’m new to and have never done,” Ordaz said. “I never went to homecoming, I never went to prom, I didn’t do any of that when I was in school. Now that I have Santi, I would love for him to experience those things, so the more I can get him to see and do things other than soccer, then I’m going to try for him.”
Playing an instrument has always been present in his family. Naturally, one of Arroyo Garcia’s main hobbies is playing the violin, which he’s done since the age of 4. He recalls wanting to learn to play piano instead, but reverted back to violin because violin was already “engraved” into him. He said that playing the violin has turned more into an instinct than a passion.
“It’s become incorporated in my day to day basis so now it’s just any other daily task,” Arroyo Garcia said. “I don’t have the passion for it as I do for soccer, I see it as doing another worksheet everyday.”
Out of all the sports he’s played—from swimming to calisthenics, ski, tennis, basketball and many more—soccer is the one he’s stuck with. Besides the overall objective and structure of the game, Arroyo Garcia says what attracted him the most is the energy.
“I’m a very energetic person who has to waste as much energy as possible every day, so the more exercise I am able to do, the better,” Arroyo Garcia said. “There’s more of a passion behind it all. I’ve found an entertaining way to waste my energy and have devoted myself to my love for soccer. I also do it because it’s a way to disconnect.”
This energy of sports is one of the culture shocks he’s noticed the most.
“It’s different because the sport is taken more seriously here and they play more often,” Arroyo Garcia said. “In Spain for example, you have to go to a club outside of school and only get to practice three days per week, and then only play one game on Saturdays. But here, you practice all the days of the week, you get to have two games per week and the people take it more seriously while having fun.”
Through soccer Arroyo Garcia has made new friends who have helped him communicate and settle in.
“The first week was very difficult for me because I wasn’t in soccer and all my friends now are in soccer with me,” Arroyo Garcia said. “Since most of them speak Spanish it makes me comfortable getting to speak with them. If I don’t know how to say something, they understand me.”
Santiago feels that he hasn’t improved his English as much as he’d like because of the large Spanish-speaking population at school.
“The thing is that like 50% of the school speaks Spanish, so every part you go to here are people speaking Spanish,” Arroyo Garcia said. “So you don’t really improve your English because there are other people speaking your same language. But in terms of vocabulary I’ve done better. I think that in about nine months, I’ll be better with my English. Yet there still is that point that there are a lot of people that speak Spanish here making it more difficult to learn more English.”